"Over Under Sideways Down
Backwards Forwards Square and Round"
Works on & With Paper

Lori Esposito, She Had to Go
Solo Exhibition

October 21 – November 25
Opening Reception: Saturday October 21

Irvine Contemporary is pleased to announce two concurrent exhibitions, “Over Under Sideways Down, Backwards Forwards Square and Round”-- Works on & With Paper, and Lori Esposito’s first solo exhibition at Irvine, She Had to Go, featuring new paintings and works on paper.

“Over Under Sideways Down
Backwards Forwards Square and Round”

“Over Under…” features work that expands and challenges the conventional category of “art on paper,” a category which has traditionally meant two-dimensional works (drawings, prints, and photography) on a paper support. The exhibition unites and celebrates the best recent works on and with paper by Irvine gallery artists and guest artists selected for the exhibition.

Charbel Ackermann’s New Geometry series is based on literalizing the “Axis of Evil” metaphor by presenting surprising views of the world that emerge when an axis is mapped out using any projection of the globe or photograph of the earth. The original lithographs in the exhibition are published by Irvine Contemporary.

Chuck Close’s Self Portrait, executed in the paper pulp “pochoir” technique, is an image based on Close’s self-portrait photograph, but is not a conventional print on paper. It is a work composed entirely of different color values of hand-made paper pulp, resulting in a unique sheet of hand-made paper in which image and medium are inseparable.

Franklin Evans, who had a highly acclaimed show at the Drawing Center in New York this year, composes complex watercolor dreamscapes that draw from many historical and contemporary visual languages.

Julie Evans has developed a unique visual language that draws from Indian painting and ornamentation, as exemplified in her new work, New Breed, in acrylic and gouache on paper on panel. Her work combines the meditative and devotional traditions of Indian painting and design with contemporary abstraction, resulting in new realms of vision and visualization.

Sean Foley’s graphically striking works in ink and gouache on paper represent a new fusion of popular culture sources ranging from cartoons, illustrations of mythical animals, and pop figuration.

Peregrine Honig creates ink and watercolor drawings with playful humor, sexiness, and irony that reference popular culture obsessions. Her drawings invoke multiple uses of the female figure, ranging from innocence to sexual provocation and everything in between.

Susan Jamison creates exquisitely rendered drawings in graphite, thread, and hair that expand the boundaries of drawings and representation. Her images often invoke a kind of magical realism in the use of insect and animal imagery in relation to the female figure.

Nicholas Kahn and Richard Selesnick are known for their imaginative photographic narratives of fictional historical “recreations” and fully-realized fantasy worlds. The photograph from The City of Salt series plays with references to paintings in a staged fantasy scene. Works from the artists’ Apollo Prophecies series, photographs printed in quadtone pigment ink on German etching paper, are also available.

Christine Kesler constructs elaborate urban abstractions and imagined maps in her mixed media works on paper, composed with found papers, drawing, and painting.

Ju-Yeon Kim continues her detailed exploration of Asian and contemporary abstraction in her drawings with mixed media and cut papers. Her new drawing with incisions and paper appliqué expands the space of drawing both behind and beyond the surface of the paper support.

Beverly Ress’s exquisitely rendered drawings of insects in large fields of negative space disclose the transience and fragility of beauty.

Jim Sanborn, who is well-known for his cryptographic sculptures and installation works, has also created a stunning series of photographs based on nuclear science and radiation. The photographs in the exhibition present an artillery dart with a spent uranium shell in two states, as a conventional photograph and a direct radiograph on photo paper—what we can see and the radiation that we can’t see. Other photographs from his Atomic Time series are also available.

James Siena, who is known for his drawings and paintings of networks, grids, and mazes, also recently executed a series a multi-process linocut prints that capture his compositional approach in highly saturated colors.

Lisa Stefanelli’s oil paintings on paper display her lyrical sense of line and rhythm in compositions that invoke music, dance, and pop culture pin-striping of cars and surf boards.

Randy Toy also expands the idea of monotypes in his Mixology and Mini-Mix works, which are composed of hand-printed, unfixed stacks of paper. These beautifully executed three dimensional monotypes can be viewed both as unique prints and as sculpture.

Lori Esposito, She Had to Go
Solo Exhibition

Artist’s Statement for the Exhibition

For me, the act of painting is a “site” for leaving visible traces of an internal dialogue. The new works in this exhibition are a kind of personal mapping, offering a matrix through which one can revisit events and visual experience.

Medieval painting, botanical illustration, video game landscapes, and childhood sticker book collections have all influenced me. The paintings in this show have allowed me to work out new compositional meeting places. They are created on surfaces that prompt viewers for one-on-one encounters with the new spaces that opened up in their composition. These emotive realms are dreamscapes constructed for visual wandering: they provide allegories that set in play thoughts, dreams, wishes, and desires.

I use garden iconography as a metaphor for creating layers of familiarity while maintaining a multiplicity of relationships. These “gardens of meaning” encode narratives like hidden passageways; they lay dormant waiting for discovery. I also use script and encrypted text as metaphors for discovery. The idea of secret languages reveals aspects of the painting only to those who are willing to decrypt the code.

Plants also provide an iconography for putting multiple, non-hierarchal meanings in play: our cultural language of plants is found in botanical classifications, vernacular names, medicinal uses, and ancient symbolic and mythical powers. Within these relationships are double entendres, shifting from recognizable icons to atmospheric entryways. The cryptology in my paintings, a text invented in my youth, does not duplicate the botanical messaging or other means of interpretation; rather these multiple codes set up a dialogue between image and text. Collectively they create a conversation where no single line of code is reliant upon any other; each is individual and yet together they are whole.

This process of combining codes and languages mirrors the construction of my paintings in the studio where my role becomes that of an interpreter and a stenographer of what unfolds in a dreamscape. Thus the painting you live with continues to speak, as the viewer over time repeatedly re-attunes to various visual “voices” mixing their “volumes”.